Artivest is
building a better way to invest in private funds by upgrading the entire
process for fund managers and investors alike. Our private investing
platform eliminates costs, inefficiency, and inconvenience from the private
investing experience, allowing for higher quality interactions, more
effective communications, and ultimately better relationships between
investors and funds.

For fund
managers, our solutions deliver massive process improvements and a superior
user experience for their existing investor base. We also allow them to
engage, from any location, with a broader base of sophisticated investors
using proven digital technologies.

For investors,
our platform creates a curated investment experience with expert insights
and exclusive access to exceptional investing opportunities. With Artivest,
investors can discover, evaluate, and participate in investment options that
wouldn’t be open to them otherwise, faster and more intuitively than ever
before.

In close
partnership with our fund partners and member investors, we are shaping the
future of private investing.

James
Waldinger
CEO

James Waldinger is the CEO of Artivest, a new investing
platform that brings exceptional investing to a worldwide audience. James
drew on his background in investing and online consumer marketing to found
Artivest. Previously, he served on the investment team at the global macro
hedge fund Clarium Capital, where he also ran an emerging markets-focused
investment portfolio. He has worked with a variety of Internet startups,
both in investment and operational roles, including as Peter Thiel's analyst
on his initial 2004 investment in Facebook. James earned his BA in History
from Yale, and he holds both a JD and MBA from Stanford.

“We have seen most every other industry move from an analog world to a
digital world. Investing in a private alternative is still back in the Stone
Age and right now is a time when investors have changed and are demanding
more.”- James Waldinger

Artivest is a new
way to invest in private funds, including private equity, hedge funds and
venture capital. The idea here is that there are massive inefficiencies in
the marketplace between private funds and their investors or LPs.

On the one hand,
on the private fund side, you have fund managers who spend an inordinate
amount of time flying around the world using PowerPoint decks to raise
capital and then using a fully analog system to keep track of investors --
for everything from filling out investment-subscription documents to
reporting. There is no scale to it.

On the other
hand, you have an investor base of LPs who, if they do have access to
private funds, find the process to be opaque -- figuring out how the funds
work, how the funds are different from each other, and what they are getting
themselves into. Most investors who are interested in such funds do not have
access at all, either because they do not meet the minimums or they do not
know where to start in terms of getting to a private fund.

What we do at
Artivest is solve those two problems using technology to upgrade the full
process from soup-to-nuts. We call it full-stack private investing. Using
the team’s investment and technological expertise we’re building a
web-platform that features a curated selection of private funds, investments
we’ve diligenced and are willing to get behind. We get to know the funds and
take their thousands of pages of documentation and make them easily
digestible – meaning, our investment and technology teams work in tandem to
put the appropriate information for each fund onto a nicely designed,
interactive website. After an investor learns about the fund, they can then
complete all necessary paperwork online on our platform. By managing
investors in our low minimum access vehicles, we provide investors new
opportunities to invest in private funds, and we enable the funds to bring
on a wide variety of investors that they might not have the capacity to
handle otherwise.

CEOCFO: Is this a new idea?

Mr. Waldinger:

At almost every
step of what we are doing, there are folks who are adding value in that
area—the difference with us is that we upgrade the whole investor experience
from beginning to end in an integrated way. We provide access vehicles, much
like large banks do for private wealth clients. Similarly, there are due
diligence firms out there that conduct due diligence on funds for
institutional clients. And there are companies that provide secure online
data rooms for fund documents. There are many different pieces of the puzzle
that people are working on for their clients -- we just combine all the
pieces together and offer it to an expanding audience.

CEOCFO: What were some of the
technological challenges?

Mr. Waldinger:

Technologically
speaking, we found that funds have a variety of different systems that they
use to manage investor-facing operations -- from Excel spreadsheets to CRM
systems to printed hard-copy documents for signatures -- and rarely are they
integrated together. Our challenge was to build a system that could function
smoothly and appropriately at each level, which involved getting our hands
dirty to get a handle on compliance, security, and regulatory requirements,
and creating adherent technology that met all requirements on the one hand
and was a positive experience for end users on the other.

The biggest
challenge we faced on the website itself was almost more of a behavioral
design than a technology challenge -- it was using existing technology to
create a great user experience, engineering to meet the expectations of fund
managers and investors. Over 90 percent of high net-worth individuals use
the Internet when investing. We dug deep into investor behavior and built a
UX that enables them to do what they normally would without sending them on
a wild goose chase to invest.

CEOCFO: Where are you in the
development and commercialization process?

Mr. Waldinger:

We built the
product end-to-end and used it to close the beta with our first private fund
partner. We are now going to be rolling out a variety of private equity and
hedge funds. For now, we are building the product with a limited community
of investors, managers, and financial advisers, to ensure that we are doing
it right with high-quality players that can best co-create with us.

The long-term
mission is to bring a wider audience of investors - be they individuals,
high net-worth institutions, etcetera – access to exceptional investment
opportunities; to facilitate that two-way relationship, to do so in a more
efficient way.

CEOCFO: What is the business model?

Mr. Waldinger:

We work with
larger private-equity, hedge-fund, and venture-capital firms that have
established brands—and down the line we’ll feature emerging managers who are
getting their start and growing, but are harder for investors to find and
assess. We’re currently charging an advisory fee on access fund assets we
manage—for diligence, content, document administration, custodial services,
and the programs and events for members who invest. We are able to keep fees
lower than other avenues of access by keeping our organization lean and the
process technology-enabled.

CEOCFO: Is there any regulatory
oversight?

Mr. Waldinger:

Yes, we are
regulated by the SEC, FINRA, the CFTC, and the NFA for our various products
and services. One of the big challenges out there that creates opportunity
for us is that increasing compliance requirements can make it understandably
difficult for large firms to do new and creative things. We are using
technology to innovate within compliance (we’ve got lots of lawyers on and
around the team making sure we get it right), to keep moving quickly to
build a creative, differentiated offering for funds and investors. By
observing strict compliance on our end as a company and developing strong
expertise around changes in the compliance regime, we offer funds added
value--and help them get comfortable with us.

CEOCFO: What can you tell us about
the big plans?

Mr. Waldinger:

Our mission is to
break down the inefficiencies in connecting top money managers with those
who’d like to invest. The big plans are to expand our products to offer
excellent—and appropriate--investing opportunities to a wider audience
beyond the limited base that meet qualifications for investing in private
products. We will be able to offer a variety of fund structures to enable
that. We are starting narrow in a way that we think makes the most sense to
both service and upgrade the industry, as well as help us build our
business. We eventually want to enable a wider range of money managers and
investors to connect.

CEOCFO: Why pay attention to
Artivest?

Mr. Waldinger:

The world has
already changed. We have seen most every other industry move from an analog
world to a digital world. Investing in a private alternative is still back
in the Stone Age and right now is a time when investors have changed and are
demanding more. In a zero interest-rate world, they want more returns.
Investors are using the internet to find new opportunities and are expecting
to get access and information easily and in a transparent way. Regulations
have changed, such as the JOBS Act, to open things up and make things more
transparent. Technology has changed and enables us to do something at real
scale. We are building a better way to invest in general, but especially in
private funds. We think the world of investing is going to look different
five or 10 years down the road, and so we’re striking while the iron is hot.

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